In today's society, people make hundreds of choices daily. Some of these choices pertain to routine matters, the outcomes of which tend to be generally predictable. Examples of such choices include, for example, what to wear, what to eat, who to call, what time to come home from work, etc. Other choices may involve more uncertainty. In making these uncertain choices, a satisfactory outcome is rarely assured. Some of these uncertain choices may involve life-maintenance or work-related issues, such as purchasing decisions pertaining to the acquisition of goods or services, for example. Other uncertain choices may be highly personal: forming a team from a group of people, establishing a supervisor-subordinate pairing at work, or discovering a social, romantic, or marriage partner. In each of these choices, a satisfactory outcome is not always assured and failure may occur despite extensive preparation and/or research prior to making the decision.
Although the invention herein may apply to any situation in which choices need to be made when the outcome is not readily predictable in advance (i.e., uncertain choices), the dating example will be employed in this disclosure to facilitate discussion. In many ways, dating is a familiar and representative example of a series of uncertain choices. In the dating arena, a person seeking a date (referred to herein as the “date seeker”) must make choices in selecting potential dates (whether for a short-term encounter or for a long-term relationship) based on imperfect and incomplete information, leading to high uncertainty in the outcome.
With respect to imperfect information, a date seeker usually has, for example, a self-perception about his looks, personality, and/or status, which may or may not reflect his objective qualifications and/or characteristics. Further, the date seeker may also have pre-conceived ideas about the characteristics of his perfect date. However, these pre-conceived ideas may or may not approximate the characteristics of the person who may in fact be a good match for that date seeker. Since dating choices are sometimes made based on flawed self-perception and/or inaccurate requirements for potential dates, the result tends to be highly uncertain and oftentimes unsatisfactory.
To help improve dating matches, many commercial services have sprung up over the years to assist date seekers in finding desirable matches. In the interne era, many of these services have become computerized and networked, and many have amassed a large database of candidates for fulfilling match requests made by date seekers.
In a typical arrangement, users sign up to be candidates for matches and to request matches with an internet-based dating service. A date seeking user is typically asked to input his personal information, including for example both his self-description and the perceived description of his ideal date. The user-inputted data is then employed to filter through the database of users to find potential match candidates. These potential candidates, typically representing a small percentage of the total number of users, are then presented to the date seeker for selection. Although some service may employ certain privacy protection techniques, the basic premise remains the same in that a date seeker is presented for selection, at some point in time, a list of potential candidates that has been filtered from the user database using data supplied by the date seeker.
Unfortunately, a date seeker's flawed self-perception and/or flawed pre-conceived ideas about his ideal date may adversely affect the accuracy of the filtering program that is typically employed to search the database. For example, a date seeker may honestly perceive himself as being athletic or as a social liberal person despite the fact that he may lead a sedentary lifestyle, objectively speaking, or may be extremely conservative on most social issues. As another example, a user may also honestly believe that he desires an outgoing, high-energy date when he may in fact be more at ease and happier when dating someone more relaxed and easy-going.
Some internet-based dating services attempt to improve on the filtering approach by employing trained professionals such as psychologists to prepare the set of questionnaires for users. These questions or “compatibility tests” are intended to solicit more truthful or relevant data from a date seeker regarding himself and his ideal match. The psychologists may also assist in formulating filtering programs to enable the database engine to select candidates with a higher probability for compatibility. However, the use of psychologists does not guarantee success since the questions and filtering programs may reflect the attitudes, preferences and values of the psychologists instead of the date seeking population. As a result, the data acquired may be less than relevant for compatibility matching purposes and/or the filtering programs may provide match candidates that may be biased toward high compatibility with the people who devise the filtering processes instead of selecting for compatibility between the date seekers themselves.
Further, even if psychologists could devise highly relevant questions and could come up with filtering strategies that result in more compatible recommendations, poor results are still possible if, as discussed, the date seeker's self-perception and/or the date seeker's pre-conceived ideas about his ideal dates are inaccurate. This is because contemporary dating services, both traditional and internet-based, tend to rely almost exclusively on the self-perception data and the ideal match description data provided by the date seeker in filtering through the database. In this case, although the system may be able to provide the date seeker with the candidates he thinks he wants, dissatisfaction may still result since the imagined personas of each candidate are likely more compatible than the people themselves.